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Encountering Greek American Soundscapes Anthony Shay Pomona College Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Pomona Faculty Publications and Research Pomona Faculty Scholarship 1-1-2017 Encountering Greek American Soundscapes Anthony Shay Pomona College Recommended Citation Shay, Anthony. Forthcoming. "Encountering Greek American Soundscapes." In Tina Bucuvalas, ed, Greek Music in America. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Pomona Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pomona Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Encountering Greek American Soundscapes Anthony Shay For this chapter I will look at Greek American music making through the eyes of a non-Greek, my younger self, who enjoyed and sought out this musical tradition for over fifty years, primarily as a folk dance enthusiast. For the international recreational dancer of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Greek music has rich melodic lines and many different rhythmic patterns (5/8; 7/8; 9/8, etc.) that attracted many individuals of Anglo American background like me to learn these dances, especially in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when recreational and performance folk dance constituted a major leisure-time activity for hundreds of thousands of mainstream Americans who had no ethnic roots, but longed for the warmth and conviviality to be found in Greek dance events. (Shay 2008) Another attraction for the dancer, especially in certain Greek American events like church-sponsored festivals and in the taverna, the Greek equivalent of a night club, is that conviviality rules and as such the music and dance is accompanied by delicious food, drink, engaging light- hearted conversation, compelling music, and appealing dances—a far cry from the bland American popular music and food with which I grew up. (See Shay 2002) When searching for where Greek Americans and, to a lesser extent non- Greeks, encounter Greek music in America, one must look first into the contexts in which Greeks listened to music, sang, played musical instruments, and danced in the home country, and then to look at patterns of Greek immigration into the United States. These two factors determine the types of music one can encounter in the several different contexts in the new country, who is playing or singing each of the musical genres and the attitudes that people have toward them, and, finally, who is forming the audience in each context. Much of this changed over time, and yet, some musical and dance practices remained the same and many individuals derive comfort from the familiar performance genres and locales. When people leave their homes for an unknown and an unfamiliar destination, for many of the immigrant populations, especially in the beginning of their arrival to the new land, there exists a great need to surround themselves with the familiar, and this was true for the Greeks who came to America, a place that could turn hostile to early immigrants. (See Shay 2006, 94-95) This is especially true for the many genres of music and dance because of their potential for nostalgic connections with the homeland, and which can bring fond memories of the life in the old country, because they are generally associated with happy occasions that broke up the ceaseless toil that characterized Greek village life, and, thus, music and dance can bring comfort and solace in a new environment in special way tied to warm memories. For later generations, music and dance provided, and continues to provide a means of constructing their identity as Greek Americans, and that continues even today in the context of formal folk dance contexts, as I will describe later. Music in Greece There exists in Greece three basic types of music: church music of Byzantine origin, two large types of folk music: mainland and island, and urban music, which was largely developed by the sophisticated Greek population of Athens, Piraeus, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul. Two strains of immigrants brought this music both to Greece after the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1922-23, while some musicians from those locations bypassed Greece, where work was scarce, and came directly to the United States. Greek Church Music Most Greeks and Greek Americans hear Byzantine ecclesiastical music for masses, and for special ceremonies like marriages throughout their lives. This musical genre is exclusively vocal. Unlike the Latin church, Greek Orthodox musical practice never included instrumental music. This is true both in Greece and in America where I first heard this enchanting music echoing in the large Saint Sophia cathedral in central Los Angeles in the early 1950s while attending a mass with my friend Efstathios Gourgouris. That music is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it certainly is an important part of the Greek American soundscape, as it is in Greece. Greek Folk Music As I have noted elsewhere (2006), immigration patterns for many ethnic and national groups determines which musical genres are brought to the New World. Typically, most Greek immigrants in the beginning of the heaviest period of Greek immigration were men, sometimes 90 – 95% of Greek immigrants. (Hecker and Fenton 1978; Jones 1990) Many of them came to make enough money to buy land and then return home to Greece to marry and raise a family. Frequently, individual immigrants, or, later families, would arrive from different villages. This meant that most of the music that was regionally or locally specific would no longer be performed in the New World because the individuals would have no one to dance with, to sing with, or find instrumentalists who knew the regional or local repertoire with which they were familiar. A sufficient number of Cretans and Cypriots came to certain urban locations in America and Canada and were exceptions to the above statement in that they continued to practice dances from those two locations in some cities in the New World where they founded lodges and clubs. In Greek villages prior to World War II, when roads were few and poor, many communities lived in extreme isolation. “Before extensive road-building programs after World War II, treacherous, mountainous terrain on the mainland separated regions and often nearby villages. Unpredictable seas isolated Greece’s fourteen hundred islands.” (Cowan 2000, 2007). This isolation resulted in the creation of more than 80 specific regional music and dance styles throughout the islands and mainland of Greece, the number provided by Alkis Raftis, the President of the Dora Stratou Greek Folk Dances Theatre. (1998, 296). In these regions local musicians, either Greeks or Roma played for the panigyria, the local festivals, weddings, or for market days. They played a variety of local instruments, the most popular and widespread are described by Alkis Raftis (1987) and Cowan (2000). 1 (See Cowan 2000 for the musical varieties, and Petrides (1975a and c) and Holden and Vouras (1965) for the many types of regional folk dances of the Greek mainland and islands with instructions for how to perform them) The multitude of music and dance styles found in these 80 regions, was, for the most part, with the exceptions noted above, not brought to the United States and Canada because the individuals who performed them were often single individuals or families who were often the only persons from that specific region. Instead, once they reached the United States, they learned the four or five dances that the majority of Greek Americans performed: the syrto, the kalamatiano, the tsamiko, and the hasapiko, the so-called panhellenic dances. 2 Most regional, locally specific, music and dance forms remained in Greece. 3 Many Greeks, both those who immigrated to cities within Greece or abroad, tried to return to the natal villages of their families, especially on the village’s patron saint’s day, to bathe and breathe in the familiar dances and music of their ancestors. Alkis Raftis notes, “Emigrant villagers will travel for hours or even days to attend their village feast, expatriates from Canada, Australia, the United states and other far-flung corners of the globe delight in bringing their families to this event” (1987, 40). Music and dance, and their ties to the natal village continue to hold deep meaning for Greeks. The salience of dance, and its deep meaning that resonates in Greek rural life, is underscored by Cowan’s description: “dancing at festive events remains a highly structured social practice, whose rules vary from one locality to another. In addition to striving for an exuberant high (kefi), which comes from copious wine and conviviality, people ‘perform’ gender, class, political, and regional identities, negotiate power relations, and express solidarity or rivalry, with kin, neighbors, and friends” (2000, 1017). Cowan’s magisterial study of dancing events in Northern Greece amply demonstrates her way of describing the many ways in which dancing is entwined in Greek life and constitutes a vehicle for identity construction. If these dances and musical traditions were specific to a small area, this meant that the traditional instruments associated with these regional styles—a wide variety of bagpipes, double-reed zournas, lyra, and other string instruments, and percussion instruments usually crafted by local instrument makers-- generally remained behind as well. The musicians of these traditions generally did not immigrate. In Greece,
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